[Ecls-list] ECL and UIs

[Peter Keller]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 06:08:00PM -0700, Jason Sewall wrote:
> Thanks for your input; perhaps I'll try a little harder to get the
> ECL/commonqt thing working, or perhaps I'll try cl-gtk.

If cl-gtk2 works with ECL, that would be a good way to go. The cl-gtk2
interface is slightly idiosyncratic in a few places, but most of it is
present enough to do a lot. The C GTK+ interface is well documented and
most of the examples are easily transferable to cl-gtk2. You can download
the source code to "Foundations of GTK+ development" and convert it to
CL until you grok the cl-gtk2 API.

I used parts of lispbuilder-sdl to load and deal with images, or draw
vector graphics onto surfaces that I then texture map onto polygons in
an opengl context. In my tests, the performance of writing an opengl
visualization program in common lisp using cl-gtk2 was very good. 

If using quicklisp, there is a little oddity about getting the gtk-glext
system to compile and run. Apparently due to it needing opengl on the
machine, etc, etc, etc, that system isn't enabled to compile by default. I
remember it only took me a few minutes to figure out whatever problem
I encountered.  The only thing to really get right is that the event
loops of lispbuilder-sdk and cl-gtk DON'T MIX! Using the cl-gtk event
loop was what I found to be the most useful option.

Instead of writing your own bindings or widget library (since that isn't
the apparent focus of your project) I'd suggest using something that
already exists and supplying patches for the broken stuff. It might be
frustrating that it doesn't work out of the box, but patching it and
submitting it would be a lot more efficient use of time.

Later,
-pete